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... he's been bitten one too many times by what seems to have become the standard in the Perl community: an attitude defined by smart-assing and nitpicking. Ask a stupid question and you're in for a kick in the ass! Out there in the normal world it's known that there simply is no such thing as a stupid question - not so in Perl world.
IMHO this is one of the things that's making Perl unattractive to beginners and causes it to lose ground in a frightening way. The Perl community is shrinking to a few highly proficient experts whereas the number of beginners or not-so-hard-core (mostly web) developers is getting smaller and smaller, ultimately fleeing to PHP or Ruby where they find a lot more "average" developers (AND experts) they can relate to. Having lots of experts is great - but having _only_ experts kills whatever it is you're working with.

This has little to nothing to do with the Perl community. Nearly every technical channel I've ever been on has the same, "Please just ask your question" mentality, because it is very frustrating to watch people join the channel, say "hello? I have a question. I'm going to ask it soon!" and then/quit when no one announces his approval or awareness of this.

I am aware that there are things about the Perl community that drive away new blood. I just don't think that this particular transcript demonstrates an

Right, but I think it doesn't hurt replying to this "ok, let's start a conversation" statement in a nice way either, does it? A simple "Shoot!" is what I'd expect from a real conversation. Why does this have to lead to snippy replies on irc that just disencourage the questioner? It makes the whole thing more human. After all that's what distinguishes it from a "conversation" held by robots where one bot tries to dump some data in a machine-readable format the other one might be able to parse:)
You're righ